Trump Economic Advisor Gary Cohn Bought Risky Biotech Lottery Ticket

We knew Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive President Donald Trump picked to be a top economic advisor, is rich. No surprise, then, that Trump Administration financial disclosures released last night show he has assets worth between $252 million and $611 million.

But here’s a surprise: Cohn disclosed he owns shares in a little known biotechnology company that is developing drugs to reverse symptoms of aging, aiming to reverse conditions like baldness and arthritis. And that shows how wealthy individuals are willing to make extremely risky bets in the biotech sector, a phenomenon which helped lead to the mess around the diagnostic testing company Theranos.

Gary D. Cohn, Trump's economic advisor, has invested in Samumed, which is working on curing baldness.

Samumed, which was the subject of a Forbes cover story last year, was valued at $12 billion in its most recent investment round, which the company said raised $100 million. That’s a staggering figure, and it has made Samumed a very controversial company in biotechnology circles. The most valuable publicly traded company that is developing drugs but does not yet sell any, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, is worth just shy of $5 billion.

Traditional fund managers and venture capitalists shy away from Samumed in part because it is so expensive. Usually, the end game for investors in a biotech startup is to list its shares on the stock market through an initial public offering. But Samumed admits it could not deliver its investors a return in this manner any time soon.

"At the company level at this point, as you pointed out, our valuation is already an eye opener," Samumed's founder, chairman and chief executive, Osman Kibar, said at the Forbes Healthcare Summit last December. "For a pre-revenue company at that valuation, it's just impossible for us to get a fair market cap if we were try and go public today."

Forbes values Kibar as a billionare because he owns a third of the company.

According to the financial disclosure form, Cohn has made two investments in Samumed LLC, described as a medical technology company in California. Both Cohn’s investments in Samumed are valued at more than $1 million each. One of those investments is associated with “interest capital gains” of between $201 and $1,000, and the other claims interest in the same amount, suggesting the investments are later-stage in nature.